Displaying items by tag: Marylandhttp://peopledemandingaction.org
Sun, 15 Sep 2019 10:35:55 +0000Joomla! - Open Source Content Managementen-gbThis City Could Become The Next Detroithttp://peopledemandingaction.org/campaigns/economic-and-social-justice/item/305-this-city-could-become-the-next-detroit
http://peopledemandingaction.org/campaigns/economic-and-social-justice/item/305-this-city-could-become-the-next-detroit

Starting this week, 25,000 households in Baltimore will suddenly lose their access to water for owing bills of $250 or more, with very little notice given and no public hearings.

Rita, a renter in Southeast Baltimore who asked to remain anonymous for this story in order to protect her two children from being taken away, told ThinkProgress she was served with a shutoff notice last week. Maryland law states that a child that is “neglected” may be taken out of his or her home and put into foster care. One characteristic of “neglect” as defined by the Maryland Department of Human Resources is a child with “consistently poor hygiene” that is “un-bathed, [having] unwashed or matted hair, noticeable body odor.”

“I love my kids, and I’d do anything for them,” Rita told ThinkProgress. “But if I turn on the shower or the sink and there’s no water, how can I give them a bath?”

Food and Water Watch researcher Mary Grant explained that making water unavailable to residents is a major health risk, and that if Baltimore were to deprive 25,000 households of water, diseases would have a high chance of propagating throughout densely-populated neighborhoods.

“There is direct risk associated with lack of access to water,” Grant told ThinkProgress. “When you lose your water service, you lose water to wash your hands to flush the toilet, there is risk of disease spreading.”

City officials like Department of Public Works director Rudy Chow claim that residents using water without paying are to blame for the $40 million in overdue water bills. In fact, the Baltimore Sun found more than a third of the unpaid bills stem from just 369 businesses, who owe $15 million in revenue, while government offices and nonprofits have outstanding water bills to the tune of $10 million. One of those businesses, RG Steel (now bankrupt) owes $7 million in delinquent water bills all by itself.

“It’s interesting that the city isn’t targeting those businesses first,” Grant said.

According to Grant, Baltimore has steadily increased water usage rates over the past three years by a total of 42 percent, once another 11 percent rate increase takes effect this July. The Baltimore Sun reported that the public works department elected to raise the rates in 2013, when 19,500 customers owed $29.5 million. While the city has pointed out that there are payment plans available for residents behind on water bills, Grant said the help is far too small to make any real difference for overdue households.

“There is low-income assistance, but it’s only a one-time payment of $161,” Grant said.

Approximately half of Baltimore’s 1.8 million residents rent their homes, and many are counting on property owners to promptly pay water bills. Even if a landlord is not making payments, Baltimore’s water department refuses to open new water accounts for anyone who isn’t a property owner. Jessica Lewis, co-founder of the Housing Rights Alliance, said landlords shifting water payment responsibilities to tenants is a “growing problem.”

“We have weekly tenants’ meetings here, and there’s never a meeting where someone isn’t talking about how high the water bills are,” Lewis said. “Tenants have a hard time challenging water bills when these burdens are shifted from the landlord to the tenant.”

Last year in Detroit, residents fought back against a similar plan to shut off water to customers with overdue bills. At one point, the United Nations stepped in and condemned the city’s water shutoff plan, taking the side of residents unable to pay increasingly high water bills.

“Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights,” the statement read.

Catarina de Albuquerque, a UN expert on the human right to water and sanitation, directly addressed the argument that Detroit Water and Sewerage Department officials proposed that residents who have the means but don’t pay deserve to lose their access to water.

“Disconnections due to non-payment are only permissible if it can be shown that the resident is able to pay but is not paying. In other words, when there is genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections,” de Albuquerque said in the statement.

According to Jessica Lewis, Baltimore’s recent water shutoff initiative may be the follow-up to a failed effort that could have led to the privatization of Baltimore’s water last year. In August 2014, a group of Baltimore residents and community organizations formed the One Baltimore United coalition, which dedicated itself to fighting a proposed $500,000 consulting contract between the City of Baltimore and Veolia, a private water corporation.

The Baltimore Sun reported that Veolia’s proposal for an evaluation of the city’s aging water systems would ostensibly improve “operation and maintenance performance” while “reducing costs and enhancing operational efficiencies.” However, Lewis said that would have only paved the way to privatization.

“What happens is these studies then become proprietary information, and the city has to agree to privatizing some of its infrastructure for the repairs to be done,” Lewis said. “[The contract] was only shut down because of a strong public outcry.”

Baltimore’s crumbling water infrastructure is estimated to lose enough water to fill the city’s World Trade Center every day, about 20 percent of the total finished water revenue.

Residents and advocates are calling for the city to institute a moratorium on all water shutoffs until those served with notices have had a chance to have their side considered in public hearings. The city has yet to respond to protesters’ demands of a moratorium, and has not yet scheduled any public hearings.

“The city is trying to make the case that this is bad actors, but many people don’t have the resources to pay their water bill in this low wage economy,” Grant said. “We don’t want to get into a situation where people have to choose between food on their plate and water in their tap.”

Repeated calls to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s office, the Baltimore Department of Public Works, and Baltimore City Council president Bernard C. “Jack” Young were not returned.

Carl Gibson is an independent journalist and activist. He co-founded anti-austerity group US Uncut in 2011 and is featured in the Sundance-selected documentary "We're Not Broke." He has been published in Salon, Washington Post, and Occupy.com. Follow him on Twitter at @uncutCG.

“Judge Dawson, he don’t play,” a parent once said about Herman C. Dawson, the main juvenile court judge in Prince George’s County. And on this Tuesday morning, Judge Dawson was definitely not in a playing mood.

“Who’s in court with you today?” he demanded of Tanika, the 16-year-old standing before him in handcuffs.

“My mom,” she said.

“I know that,” Judge Dawson snapped.

An honors student, Tanika had never been in trouble with the law before. But for the past year, ever since she was involved in a fight with another girl at her high school, Judge Dawson had ruled her life, turning it into a series of court hearings, months spent on house arrest and weeks locked up at a juvenile detention center in Laurel, Md.

Most recently, he had detained her for two weeks for violating probation by visiting a friend on the way home from working off community service hours. Now he was deciding whether to release her.

“I’m hesitating because I don’t know whether you got the message,” he said.

Juvenile court judges in the United States are given wide discretion to decide what is in a young offender’s best interest. Many, like Judge Dawson, turn to incarceration, hoping it will teach disobedient teenagers a lesson and deter them from further transgressions.

But evidence has mounted in recent years that locking up juveniles, especially those who pose no risk to public safety, does more harm than good. Most juvenile offenders outgrow delinquent behavior, studies find. And incarceration — the most costly alternative for taxpayers — appears to do little to prevent recidivism and often has the opposite effect, driving juveniles deeper into criminal behavior.

“Once kids get in the system, they tend to come back, and the farther they go, the more likely they are to keep going,” said Edward Mulvey, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the author of a major study of delinquent youths.

Slowly, policy makers have begun to heed this message. After decades when states grew more punitive in their approach to juvenile crime, locking up more and more youths, more than a dozen have now revised statutes or regulations to avoid the overuse of incarceration, among them New Jersey and Indiana.

But judges are not always so quick to follow. And often the judges most resistant to change are those most determined to help troubled youths, juvenile delinquency experts say.

With midterm hangover setting in, many will chatter and finger-point into next month about what happened, who did what and why. And at the center of it will be questions about the black vote. In crucial Senate and gubernatorial races where the black vote was needed most—Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina—Democrats faced humiliating blows to the stomach.

Of course, we’ll hear a number of narratives strung through news cycles, along with crafty theatrical descriptors: the Obama Haters Club election. The Obamacare Sucks election. The Return of the Angry White People election. The Ferguson election. The election in which only 18 percent of the population followed the election closely—and more than 60 percent of those who did voted Republican.

In large part, especially as we tiptoe through the exit polls, it’s safe to claim that Tuesday night was all of the above in historic droves. This was more than a “Chaos Election,” as Brookings fellow Bill Galston sublimed. This election was a knee-jerk reaction to the chaos of stereotypes that white pundits are totally not talking about. Feeling threatened by Ebola, rioting people of color and YouTube decapitations, anxious white voters had about enough: Their vote spiked 3 percentage points higher than in 2012, to a 75 percent share of the 2014 electorate. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reedsaw it coming, when failed Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn’s campaign pushed out badly played and last-minute Ferguson mailers to mobilize Georgia’s black voters. Said Reed, “[W]hen you are trying to hold on to a regional share of the white electorate, those kinds of pieces have to be handled very delicately.”

As tragic as it was—and as hard as the social-justice crowd tried to make it otherwise—the African-American voting bloc found itself inadequate against the flood and, frankly, not energized enough to hold the dam.

Observers and organizers will go back and forth on this point. Some are already crying foul, rightfully so, over nasty Republican tinkering vis-à-vis voter-ID laws, rigged voting schedules and mysteriously closed polling stations. Those factors had some effect on something, but it’s still too early to tell exactly what and how much. But based on what the pre-election surveys and first-waveexit polls say, this was a weak black vote with a 12 percent nationwide share of Tuesday’s electorate.

We get the point: President Obama wasn’t on the ballot. And it showed. White people were voting in stronger numbers than in 2012. In contrast, the total people-of-color voter share dropped from 28 percent in 2012 to barely 25 percent in 2014. So now Democrats have two midterms to prove that it’s not their party mobilizing Obama coalition voters—it’s Obama.

Well … not anymore. Democrats are likely blasting one another in a rash of circular firing squads, scrambling to explain what happened last night. One bullet point of blame: You should have put President Obama out there where the black vote needed him most. But it didn’t matter. The only place where the president’s endorsement probably made a difference was in the Washington, D.C., mayor’s race—and he didn’t need to bust a sweat for that.

Everywhere else, the black vote went flat. The optics of a stubbornly bad black unemployment rate under the black president didn’t help, and only 68 percent of African Americans approve of the president’s handling of the economy, according to YouGov (pdf). In states like Arkansas, Kentuckyand Louisiana (pdf)—where Democratic candidates bombed or went into a certain-death runoff—black approval ratings for President Obama, according to Public Policy Polling, were 72 percent, 77 percent and 81 percent, respectively. Even in Virginia (pdf), black Obama approval was lower than 80 percent just a month ago.

And it’s not as if that many African Americans were going to vote anyway, right? According to an election-eve YouGov poll (pdf), they weren’t: A hair-pulling 33 percent of black respondents claimed they weren’t even registered to vote. Only 44 percent said they were “definitely” voting, compared with 59 percent of whites. And nearly 50 percent identified themselves as “not a likely voter” when asked about which candidate they’d be voting for in the midterms.

Quite a few ditched the Democratic Party while at it. Democrats should really watch this closely into 2016: Ten percent of black voters on Tuesday went Republican. In critical Senate races such as Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia and South Carolina, the black vote went more than 7 percent Republican; now formally elected Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, got 10 percent of the black vote. In gubernatorial races such as those in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan, African-American votes for Republicans ranged from 6 percent in Illinois (the president’s "home state”) to 26 percent for incumbent Gov. John Kasich in Ohio.

That’s significant, considering that only 6 percent voted for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, and 5 percent for John McCain in 2008. Broken down further, it’s a grim picture for the next cycle if hemorrhaging continues. Exit polls show that about 11 percent of African-American millennials who did vote went Republican, and 12 percent of black Gen Xers voted GOP (along with 7 percent of those ages 45-64). Could that be the makings of the 30 percent presumptive that 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was talking about?

Note to Hillary Clinton fans: She’s not “the one.” The key takeaway for 2016 that resonated the loudest on Tuesday night: Every state through which Bill and Hillary Clinton stumped was lost to Republicans. “Every single person the Clintons worked for is getting beat,” one former elected official asking for anonymity told The Root on Tuesday evening. “Everyone. They didn’t move the base.” And according to that same YouGov poll, only 53 percent of African Americans have a “very favorable” opinion of Hillary—compared with 11 percent who don’t know. “A 60-plus-year-old white woman who has not had a job outside of politics in 30 years will not excite the Obama coalition,” said the elected official.

Only white Republicans were in the mood to make history on Tuesday night—for black Republicans. It was certainly the case in Maryland, where black Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown squandered a wide-open opportunity to become the state’s first black governor. Brown completely underestimated the racial landscape and Republican challenger Larry Hogan’s ground game. Elsewhere, state Sen. Nina Turner may have helped increase black-voter turnout in Ohio by 1 percentage point from 2012 to 16 percent, but it wasn’t enough to become the Buckeye State’s first black secretary of state (perhaps inadvertently helping Kasich more). The only winner of “firsts” was black Republican, and firebrand, Mia Love, who won a House seat. Here’s your mouthful: Not only did she become Utah’s first black member of Congress, but she is the first black Republican female member of Congress, the first Haitian American elected to Congress and one of only a handful of black residents living in her very red district.